Poems

The Sentry

     We'd found an old Boche dug-out, and he knew,
     And gave us hell, for shell on frantic shell
     Hammered on top, but never quite burst through.
     Rain, guttering down in waterfalls of slime
     Kept slush waist high, that rising hour by hour,
     Choked up the steps too thick with clay to climb.
     What murk of air remained stank old, and sour
     With fumes of whizz-bangs, and the smell of men
     Who'd lived there years, and left their curse in the den,
     If not their corpses. . . .
                                  There we herded from the blast
     Of whizz-bangs, but one found our door at last.
     Buffeting eyes and breath, snuffing the candles.
     And thud! flump! thud! down the steep steps came thumping
     And splashing in the flood, deluging muck—
     The sentry's body; then his rifle, handles
     Of old Boche bombs, and mud in ruck on ruck.
     We dredged him up, for killed, until he whined
     "O sir, my eyes—I'm blind—I'm blind, I'm blind!"
     Coaxing, I held a flame against his lids
     And said if he could see the least blurred light
     He was not blind; in time he'd get all right.
     "I can't," he sobbed.  Eyeballs, huge-bulged like squids
     Watch my dreams still; but I forgot him there
     In posting next for duty, and sending a scout
     To beg a stretcher somewhere, and floundering about
     To other posts under the shrieking air.

     Those other wretches, how they bled and spewed,
     And one who would have drowned himself for good,—
     I try not to remember these things now.
     Let dread hark back for one word only:  how
     Half-listening to that sentry's moans and jumps,
     And the wild chattering of his broken teeth,
     Renewed most horribly whenever crumps
     Pummelled the roof and slogged the air beneath—
     Through the dense din, I say, we heard him shout
     "I see your lights!"  But ours had long died out.